1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a data processing system and in particular to a method and apparatus for communications systems. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a computer implemented method and computer usable program code for efficiently managing access control in an electronic messaging system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging (herein after referred to as email(s)) systems have become a standard means of communication in the business world, as well as with the general population. Typically, messages sent to one or more recipients are exchanged numerous times through reply and forwarded messages, creating a message thread or chain, which may be referred to as an email chain. Each time a message is exchanged between various recipients, the email chain becomes larger as each previous message is included in subsequent messages.
Emails generally do not have support for access control. Typically access control is required when a mail is sent to multiple recipients. Many-a-times different parts of the single email will have to be made visible to different recipients depending on the access rights of the recipients. The access rights depend on various factors such as the position of the recipient in the hierarchy of the organization, the role of the recipient (role based access control) etc. This is typically true of the emails sent by senior people within an organization who have to send mails to various set of people with different access control. For example, in a particular scenario, a common disadvantage is that the secretaries of these senior people are privy to a lot of information for which ideally they should not have access.
Consider the mail trail illustrated below, wherein the sender and recipients of the mail trail are highlighted.
Mark,                I have received the following mail from the Tim Smith who is the research relationship manager for Government sector. NASA has expressed interest in the unstructured information management work done at ABC Bank. They want to use our work for detecting financial fraud in the banking sector. Can we meet today in the afternoon to discuss this?        Suzanne, Please set up a one hour meeting with Mark today afternoon.        
Thanks,
John.
<Begin Mailfrom Tim>
. . .
. . .                <Begin Mailfrom NASA>        . . .        . . .        <End Mailfrom NASA>        
. . .
<END Mail from Tim>
In the example cited above, the sender of the email John who is the director of the organization. The mail is addressed to Mark who is a senior manager and Suzanne one of the other recipients is the secretary of John. In the above email, since the contents of the email are confidential, the secretary should not have access to that part of the email which is addressed to John.
Without a method and system to improve communication of email with specific access controls being introduced to the recipients by a sender the promise of this may never be fully achieved.